The astral plane of Unicode and Theosophy are not so far apart…
The Theosophists' idea of the astral plane is that it is the "psychic location" we visit in dreams, out-of-body experiences (which I have experienced many times and written about) and after death. I have no fixed opinion about it, and no belief attached to it. Crucially for this comparison, it is held to be a place where individuals are drawn together though similarity, unlike the material world where any individual can meet any other, and in which we encounter dissimilarities. According to the historic occult literature that underlies the New Age movement, on the Astral plane we can encounter only similarity. Social media can become like the Astral plane if we select what we already 'like' and - more significantly - if the code that serves advertising (on Facebook etc. but also on the web at large) gathers our visits and tailors ads to our apparent preferences, as it sees them.
The emoji characters in the astral planes of Unicode character encoding give us the Snowman and now-infamous Pile-of-poo (☃ 💩), as well as a load of other 'emoticons' that pepper social media posts and messages. Unicode covers most languages in an encoding of numbers and letters that range from 0-9, then A-F (U+0000 → U+FFFF). Beyond this 'Basic Multilingual Plane' of 65 thousand symbols are the 'astral planes' where many non-lingual characters live (about 1 million with code points from U+010000 → U+10FFFF). Mere co-incidence that these are now widely-used in the virtual and predominantly 'friends-only' astral-like worlds of social media, or the secret joke of programmers raised on the sci-fi spirituality and Alan Moore occult comic-book world of the early web, who coined the term Astral Planes for these trans-lingual levels of Unicode characters?
